Many limbs, one body

In recent years, Ernesto has often shown us the Church as a mission land, just as if he were a poor person knocking on the door of our Arsenals and asking to find a place among us. «Now we have to help the Church – he told us – the Church needs help». The first few times I remember asking myself the meaning of this thought of his, but since behind Ernesto's lapidary words there was always a thought that was ahead of its time, I stopped to think for a long time. The Word came to me: "Now you are the body of Christ and, each according to your part, members of him" (1Cor 12,27). I thus began to think of the Church torn apart by human frailty, by scandals, by legalism, by the weakening of faith, like the body of Jesus itself in the days of the Passion: a body wounded by thorns, by whiplash, by the weight of the cross , from nails and then from rejection, from insults and from much other evil. I felt compassion for Jesus-Church and I understood Ernesto's call. I understood better what Francis must have felt among the ruins of the church of San Damiano when he heard the voice of Jesus: "Francis go, repair my church" and began to restore the walls of the destroyed church of the Porziuncola, and then understand that Jesus did not mean the walls, but the living members of his body, the Church.

With ever more conviction we put ourselves at the service of the Church, just as over time we put ourselves at the service first of the missions, then of the young people and the poor of our home, not replacing one need with another, but always expanding the space of our tent (see Is 54.2), welcoming and making room for new needs. With this spirit we accepted the call to the priesthood of some of us already consecrated in the Fraternity of Hope and, immediately afterwards, the service in the parishes and in the basilica of Superga because the local church needed it. In these days our bishop has asked us for a new yes in faith: while we have been leading the parish of the Arsenal of Peace, San Gioacchino, for five years, he has asked us to also take over the neighboring parish, Maria Regina della Pace, with the mandate of walk together with these two communities and gradually unite them in a common spiritual journey, many members but one body: «We have all been baptized by one Spirit into one body, [...] and we have all been quenched by one Spirit» ( 1Cor 12,13). It is a challenge for the parishioners of these two realities and also for us. Ours is an entrance on tiptoe, because we enter a reality that already has a life of its own and we bring with us a reality that in previous years has rediscovered its life. We are all too aware of the disproportion and the objective difficulties. And we are not teachers. We too are students, students of the Holy Spirit who will have to do something new with us and for all of us.

Many times, when we told our choice of fraternity to the people who came to visit us, we were told this objection: you are lucky because you have chosen to be a fraternity, but in our parishes we have not chosen ourselves, we are different from each other and we cannot do many things. I have always wondered if they were right to tell us that, even though it was easy for me to associate our own with the struggles of a parish community, because among us in the Fraternity we are still different in terms of state of life, characters, age... and we cannot blend together it's not simple at all. But now that we too are a parish, the challenge is truly common: can we create fraternity according to the logic of the Gospel if we don't choose each other, if we are different? Yes, it is possible if what drives us is the personal relationship with Jesus, if we choose to be Christians of the Gospel, not of Apollos or Cephas (1Cor 3,4-7), if charity between us always has the last word (Col 3.14), if we do not close ourselves off in our well-being among ourselves, but we open ourselves to those who are far away, if we believe that the Holy Spirit can create unity and make those who are different one heart and one soul (Acts 4.32). The challenge is common: returning to being simply Christians in a difficult time, in a world that is changing. A time and a world that are apparently far from God and seem to distance us too from our certainties of faith. Yet, as always happens in the history of salvation, the time of trial becomes the favorable moment for rebirth. The Church is reborn from below, from concrete experiences of fraternal life, from small communities that in their fragility invest in the Word and the Eucharist, in service and charity.


Rosanna Tabasso
NP October 2023